This is a follow-up to this conversation but I thought it would make sense to create a specific thread.
It's basically a call to those of us who live in europe and would be interested to share thoughts about organizing something like a HandmadeCon on this side of the ocean :-) Not necessarily at the same scale or with the same format, but hey, even informal meetups could be a starting point, and better than nothing.

So if people are interested they can post their thoughts here, it would give an idea of wether it is at all doable and at what scale, which country would be a good pick, who would want to volunteer, what experience/funds we could count on, what contacts we have in the industry, etc.
It would also be great to hear shared experience from the people who organized the past handmadecons in the US.

I live in Paris, France.
I have some background organizational experience, like running a business and handling the technical side of events/festivals (as a sound engineer / technical director).
I have limited funds but I would be willing to participate if we crowd-fund the operation.
I have very little contact with the industry, being a complete outsider, but I know some researchers at Ircam (which is a research center focusing on new technologies related to music) and a neuroscientist working on speech perception, who could be interested to talk about their use/needs of computers (eg. signal processing, machine learning, procedural generation, etc.). I also have a friend working on the software of a civil drone project at the CEA, and another one working in a computer vision startup.
Okay, that's all I can think of for now ! I could also try to reach other researchers/engineers, in the field of DSP/Audio/Music if it sounds interesting to the community.

I live near Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany. I'm still in university, so I don't really have the funds or industry contacts to contribute much, but I'd certainly want to participate.

I'm on relatively good footing with a fairly well-known professor running the department for high performance computing at my university. AFAIK, his research focuses on high-volume data visualization for medical applications.
My employer hosts their own yearly conference and might have organizational advice to offer, possibly even contacts to share, though that's probably a question of scale. A former co-worker is now working in embedded development for the automotive industry.
FWIW, I'm also acquaintances with the guy managing the local B&B Hotel.

Note that I have not yet contacted any of these people about attending a convention.

I live in Maribor, Slovenia and have been organizing dev meetups for the local community, 3 regional game dev conference (www.sgc.si) and 2 regional art workshops (www.scw.si) for the last three+ years. I've also been to a couple of conference here in Europe and have some good connection to some of the eastern studios (Croteam and Wargaming just to name some that use their own engines).

Professionally I work at a game dev studio in Graz, Austria on World of Tanks (Wargaming).

It would be awesome to get Casey here (Europe) and put him in a room with some of the European game dev programming experts (just my opinion :D)

I've been in the games industry for +10 years, last 5 working as a gamedev teacher and also managing my own start-up, got daily contact with most of the studios in Barcelona (where my students do internships, I'm the coordinator) and I usually attend game-related events in Spain and I also give some conferences.

Gamedev community in Barcelona is very active (most of the devs share a Whassap group) and we have different regular meetings. Also, there are some big gamedev-related events (Gamelab, BGW, MWC, ...) and gamedev business accelerators (GameBCN, BarcelonaActiva). A part of that, we have several companies developing their own technology and an active MSX dev community.

In addition, Barcelona is a beautiful city, weather is amazing and mediterranean food delicious. :)

About organizing a HandmadeCon, well, I've only organized some meetups and I'm not concerned of all the requirements to organize that kind of event, also, don't know the specs of the event... Getting a space for 200 attenders for a couple of days and offering some acreditations and goodies shouldn't be a problem, probably finding the speakers is more work and get fundings from promoters could also take some time. Personally, I can put some money but I don't know the general cost of the event.

I'm also in the Netherlands. Still in uni/college, but it's geared toward game design (NHTV Breda) and they sometimes host guest lecturers and have also hosted an event called Everything Procedural (http://www.everythingprocedural.com/) in May this year. Now, I have never organized an event before and I'd have to ask around to see if NHTV would be open to hosting a handmade con, but on that latter aspect I'd actually be fairly confident due to the fact that NHTV has hosted plenty other events before, including game-dev related events because of the game design study attached to the uni.